Raise minimum age to 21 for everything

Matt Steinglass:

We should raise the minimum age for soldiers on combat duty to 21. Behavioural research since time immemorial shows that teenagers are prone to doing ridiculously ill-advised things, particularly under the influence of peer pressure; mortality actually goes up 200% during adolescence even when we're not shipping the rascals off to Afghanistan; and MRI mapping shows that the brain doesn't finish developing white matter until you're in your 20s.

I agree. If you're too young to buy and use booze and cigarettes until 21, then you're too young for combat duty, driving or voting until 21. It used to be called "coming of age" and has been the tradition for centuries until the commies reduced the voting age to 18.

‘I Don’t Want My 17-Year-Old Son to Have to Pick Tomatoes’

Mark Krikorian:

Those immortal words of Karl Rove justifying amnesty and mass immigration came to mind when I read that Mike Rowe, the “Dirty Jobs” guy, came to Washington yesterday “to tell members of Congress and the public that those ‘dirty’ jobs should get some more respect.” He wasn’t talking about immigration, but might as well have been:

Rowe explained that “dirty” jobs, like those in manufacturing and farming, used to mean success, but now look like settling. He wants that to change.

“I don’t think the country is going to fall back in love with manufacturing and I don’t think these policies are going to change, until or unless we reignite a fundamental relationship with dirt, work, and the business of making things, as opposed to the business of buying them,” he said.

He said one of reasons this is occurring is because community colleges and vocational education have taken the backseat to four-year college degrees.

“It’s not happening because people hate community colleges, it’s not happening because people hate the trades, it’s happening because we’re promoting a very specific kind of education at the expense of the others,” he said.

The only way we'll get uneducated Americans to pick tomatoes is to stop their welfare checks.

Was Rutgers Suicide Case a Hate Crime?

Experts:

Prosecutors would need to establish that the defendants were motivated to act because they perceived Tyler Clementi was gay.

Of course it wasn't a hate crime. It was simply an idiotic teenage prank that went horribly wrong no matter what the spokefolks of OOH say. (OOH = Organization of Outraged Homosexuals.)

The "girlification" of modern men

Toby Young in the British Spectator:

The feminisation of the latest generation of young men never ceases to amaze me. With their long, blow-dried hair, their expensive designer clothes, their ‘man bags’ and jewellery, they are like some terrifying new genetic hybrid: half-man, half-Barbie doll. God help us all if President Ahmadinejad ever decides to launch an invasion. If these milksops are responsible for the defence of the realm, the mullahs will be in Downing Street within 24 hours.

Whatever happened to the solid yeomanry of England? The obvious answer is to blame the Femi-Nazis. The relentless feminist critique of masculinity that has been blaring out of our schools and universities since the 1960s has taken its toll. Today’s young men have been ideologically programmed to believe that any overt display of masculinity — tucking their shirts in, for instance — would be an endorsement of ‘the patriarchy’. Far better to make common cause with the oppressed by using moisturiser and eating salad.
...
The problem with this explanation is that there’s little evidence the latest generation of men are having less sex. I went to a wedding recently at which the groom was an ex-public schoolboy in his twenties. No more prime specimen of girlie manhood are you likely to see. Here was Osric from Hamlet made flesh, a prancing popinjay of prettification. He’d probably spent more getting his hair done than the bride had spent on her dress. It was stomach-churning.

Yet the effect of this wet noodle on the assembled women was electrifying. As he got up on stage and started telling his bride how much he loved her, bursting into tears within 30 seconds, they literally began to drool. For them, this Barbie Man was the new masculine ideal. And let me tell you, his bride was an absolute knockout. In the good old days, men would have conquered continents for less. Yet here she was, giving herself to a man she probably could have beaten in a fight.

No, it isn’t that men have become more girlish as they’ve become more asexual. Rather, they’re being sexually rewarded for symbolically castrating themselves. To all intents and purposes, today’s young men have swapped places with women, parading in front of them like peacocks, while the newly empowered sisterhood stand on the sidelines, pointing at the men they want brought to their bedchambers.

And why have men done this? Why have they forfeited their role as protectors and breadwinners? Why do a third of university graduates want to put on aprons and clean up baby sick? Because it is so much easier than being a man. Kipling had it right. There’s no higher standard to which men can hold themselves — ‘And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son’ — so it’s hardly surprising they’ve have run crying into their mothers’ arms. I blame the feminists, but not for beating men into submission. Their crime was to give men the licence they craved to surrender all by themselves.

There is a glimmer of hope in all this. As the high ground of mascul-inity has been deserted by men, women have rushed in to claim it for themselves. If you’re looking for courage, tenacity and strength, look no further than the current generation of young women. When the mullahs cross the English Channel, it’ll be this lot they’ll have to contend with. While their boyfriends are at home nursing their broken nails, these harridans will be manning machine-gun posts.

This has been going on for quite a while. As an employer, I first noticed nearly twenty years ago that, if I needed someone to do a man's job, hire a young woman because the young men were mostly lazy sloppy slackers.

Tyler Clementi - "A very sad case out of Rutgers"

Via Daniel Foster at The Corner:

Peter Hansen, founder of Jersey Conservative, has a most thoughtful take on the tragic — on so many levels — case of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers freshman who leaped from the George Washington Bridge after a roommate secretly taped and posted to the Internet a humiliating video:

A very sad case out of Rutgers today shows how the modern mania for livestreaming video, combined with an absolute lack of moral standards, has led to the suicide of a talented young violinist.

The facts of the case are simple. Mr. Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers, requested exclusive use until midnight of the room he shared with Dharun Ravi. Mr. Ravi acceded, but then went to the room of his high school friend Molly Wei. Mr. Ravi turned on a hidden webcam to watch the unwitting Mr. Clementi have an encounter with another man. Mr. Ravi posted the video of this encounter online, and another such video two days later. Mr. Clementi soon thereafter leapt to his death from the George Washington Bridge.

As seems clear from Mr. Ravi’s Twitter feed (since deleted, tellingly), Mr. Ravi was disgusted at having to share a room with a gay man. That’s his prerogative – everyone is entitled to feel safe in a private refuge. Mr. Ravi, however, denied the same right to his roommate. If Mr. Ravi did not want to live with Mr. Clementi, he could have asked for a room transfer. Instead, he used streaming video to expose and humiliate Mr. Clementi to all the world. Through Mr. Ravi’s malevolent act, the Web turned a human life with all its complexities into just another meaningless, tawdry Web image for people to laugh at.

The horrible irony is that a fleeting Web shot, so easily forgotten by viewers, is to the victim as shattering as a bullet. The immediate impact is over instantly, but the damage is permanent. Mr. Ravi created an image that could be dredged up from a hard drive at any moment, to haunt Mr. Clementi for the rest of his life. This goes beyond blackmail. It is the reduction of a human life into one degrading instant, forever replayed, allowing no progress and no redemption.

Tyler Clementi, 18, threw himself off the George Washington Bridge after the video of him with another male student was streamed online:

Tyler Clementi, 18, who was studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, jumped from the George Washington Bridge.

He posted a final message on the social networking website Facebook, which read: "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."

Paul Mainardi, a lawyer for his family said: "Tyler was a fine young man and a distinguished musician. The family is heartbroken beyond words."
...
Fellow students Dharun Ravi, who was Clementi's room-mate, and Molly Wei, have been charged with invasion of privacy and could face up to five years in prison if convicted.

They are accused of placing a camera in the room and streaming the images straight on to the internet.

In a message posted on microblogging website Twitter on Sep 19 Ravi allegedly said: "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."

From L to R - Tyler Clementi, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei:

Everything I Ever Learned About Civility I Learned in a Small Town

Katherine Dalton:

Henry County, KY. Lesson One: Don’t honk unless it’s friendly. And for goodness’ sake don’t honk at the Ford stopped interminably at the town’s lone traffic light. It’s bound to be Miss Carrie, age 82, deciding whether or not she needs to go the bank (right), or straight on home to start dinner (left). What’s your hurry anyway? Honk and make her jump and you’ll feel guilty for a month.

Precisely. You can only be a rude obnoxious asshole in cities where everyone is basically an anonymous asshole anyway. And the Internet is only just a big mega-city in some ways and populated with even ruder and more obnoxious anonymous assholes. Give me Mayberry over Megalopolis anyday. The whole article is enjoyable but I loved the conclusion:

Still, keep your nose clean, because your life is not really your own, and not only is the good Lord watching—so are about forty other people.

Harry Brown - the best Brit movie I've seen this year

Harry Brown (2009):

When a crew of drug-dealing gang members takes the life of his only friend, Leonard (David Bradley), retired Marine and widower Harry Brown (Michael Caine) decides to take the law into his own hands...

Quotes from Harry Brown:

[On shooting a drug dealer whose gun jammed when he tried to kill him] "You failed to maintain your weapon, Son. I don't reckon you've got long. Seen that before. Gut wound. The slug's probably torn right through your liver. Mate of mine in Ulster got caught in sniper fire. Bullet blew his inside out. He screamed for a good 10 minutes. We couldn't send a medic in, the section was too hot. So we all took cover... and watched him die."

Review:

It will be said by many that this is predictable and shallow on plot or sub-plot and this would be true.

What this film does, however, is take Grand Torino and turn it into the film it should have been, could have been, ought to have been.

This is no Death Wish movie. It is the story of a man driven to the absolute end of his tether by events. You can feel the emotion in Caine's performance.

Business and banking

Savers should stop complaining about poor returns and start spending to help the economy, a senior Bank of England official warned today:

Older households could afford to suffer because they had benefited from previous property price rises, Charles Bean, the deputy governor, suggested.

They should "not expect" to live off interest, he added, admitting that low returns were part of a strategy.

His remarks are likely to infuriate savers, who are among the biggest victims of the recession. About five million retired people are thought to rely on the interest earned by their nest-eggs. But almost all savings accounts now pay less than inflation.

The typical savings rate has fallen from more than 2.8 per cent before the financial crisis to 0.23 per cent last month.

Mr Bean said he "fully sympathised". But he continued: "Savers shouldn't necessarily expect to be able to live just off their income in times when interest rates are low. It may make sense for them to eat into their capital a bit."

He added: "Very often older households have actually benefited from the fact that they've seen capital gains on their houses."
...
Mr Bean said that encouraging Britons to spend was one reason why the Bank had cut interest rates. They have been held at 0.5 per cent for 18 months, hitting rates offered on savings accounts.

The strategy had led to Mervyn King, the governor, receiving many letters of complaint.

But it was designed to return the economy to a reasonable level of activity as quickly as possible, he said. "The faster we can achieve that, the sooner interest rates will get back to more normal levels."
...
Dot Gibson, of the National Pensioners Convention, said: "For years we've been told to put money aside for our retirement only to find that interest rates have sunk and now we have to use our savings just to pay the bills."

Jason Riddle, of Save Our Savers, said: "The Bank was aware that there was a lack of saving before the financial crisis, but those who were prudently saving while others spent, are being heavily punished."

Official figures show that savers have lost about £18 billion a year in interest as a result of the Bank's response to the worst recession in a generation.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says "Shut Down the Fed":

I apologise to readers around the world for having defended the emergency stimulus policies of the US Federal Reserve, and for arguing like an imbecile naif that the Fed would not succumb to drug addiction, political abuse, and mad intoxicated debauchery, once it began taking its first shots of quantitative easing.

My pathetic assumption was that Ben Bernanke would deploy further QE only to stave off DEFLATION, not to create INFLATION. If the Federal Open Market Committee cannot see the difference, God help America.

We now learn from last week’s minutes that the Fed is willing “to provide additional accommodation if needed to … return inflation, over time, to levels consistent with its mandate.”
...
Worse still, he seems determined to print trillions of emergency stimulus without commensurate emergency justification to test his Princeton theories, which by the way are as old as the hills. Keynes ridiculed the “tyranny of the general price level” in the early 1930s, and quite rightly so. Bernanke is reviving a doctrine that was already shown to be bunk eighty years ago.

So all those hillsmen in Idaho, with their Colt 45s and boxes of Kruger Rands, who sent furious emails to the Telegraph accusing me of defending a hyper-inflating establishment cabal were right all along. The Fed is indeed out of control.

The sophisticates at banking conferences in London, Frankfurt, and New York who apologized for this primitive monetary creationism – as I did – are the ones who lost the plot.

My apologies. Mercy, for I have sinned against sound money, and therefore against sound politics.

Airstrip One is mostly ruled by loony Keynesian bankers but it still has a few sane businessmen. The USA seems to be trying hard to imitate Airstrip One.

Coulter and the Homocons

The "conservative Judy Garland" at the GOProud fundraiser:

"Gays are the molecular opposites of blacks," Ann Coulter tells a room full of gay men (some of them black), because "everybody likes the gays moving in next door." And yet, the self-proclaimed right-wing Judy Garland explains, gay marriage "is not a civil right — you're not black."

Welcome to Homocon 2010, a fundraiser for gay conservative organization GOProud, held in PayPal founder Peter Thiel's candlelit New York apartment on Saturday night. Tickets went for $2,500, and the attendees — from middle-aged millionaires in dark suits to twenty-somethings in T-shirts proclaiming FREEDOM IS FABULOUS — are laughing uproariously at Coulter's punch lines. Afterward they hug her, beg for photos, and thank her "for saying what needs to be said" and "for everything you do."

This inexplicable, masochistic affection for Coulter (who went on to say that "I don't care how many studies Ted Olson produces" about gay couples making good parents, because the ideal is "one mother, one father") mirrors the conflicted loyalties of gay conservatives: who do you listen to when Republicans demonize you to win an election? Coulter may continue the line that gay marriage "was foisted on Americans by the courts," but as a movement, these men — and some women — remain more serious than their keynote speaker in their efforts to shift the GOP establishment into focusing on economic issues rather than social ones.

After all, it was Olson, George W. Bush's Solicitor General, who successfully argued for overturning California's Prop 8, and the Log Cabin Republicans who won a lawsuit that (kinda) overturned Don't Ask, Don't Tell — while Democrats failed to push the repeal through Congress, and the Obama Administration continues to defend a discriminatory policy that it opposes.
...
In her speech on Saturday, Coulter says that "not only can gays be conservative, you pretty much have to be," because they are the "highest income demographic," because "gays are too stylish to work for the federal government," because radical Muslims want to execute them, and because "once [scientists] find the gay gene, guess who's getting aborted?"

This is the same Coulter, of course, who is comfortable with the word "faggot," wrote that Rick Santorum's comparison of gay sex to bestiality is an "indisputably true point," told an interviewer that sexually active gay men should "feel guilty about it," and mocked the "irritating lesbian" teenager in Tennessee who wanted to bring her girlfriend to senior prom. When The Politics Blog asks her why gay conservatives still gravitate toward her, Coulter dips back to the humor well: "Gays are the least politically correct people in the world — they like my jokes." And then there's this, which is apparently not a joke because she repeats the sentiment a half-dozen times throughout the night: "Gays are against gay marriage."

Never mind that numerous attendees (especially the younger ones) challenge her viewpoint on Constitutional grounds during the question-and-answer session. "The equality clause is about just the blacks," she snaps in response. Nevertheless, this isn't a dealbreaker for her gay fans. As lesbian conservative radio host Tammy Bruce — a GOProud advisor — whispers to a friend, "She's so wrong, but I love her."
...
So it would seem, from one strange night anyway, that gay conservatives don't mind government intervention as long as it levels the playing field. They don't want equal results, just equal opportunity, and it's hard to argue with that — unless, of course, you're Ann Coulter, who is aware of the irony in her position: "I'm 120 years old and I'm not married." Which leaves you wondering: Is this culture warrior serious about every word that comes out of her mouth, or none of them?

The answer, whatever it means, is "yes."

I can hear the groans of "Post this on your new blog, woncha?" I will once it's up and running. I'm just storing stuff here meanwhile.

Drugs and the politics of prohibition

Kathryn Jean Lopez:

There are different views around here about some illegal drugs and whether or not they should be, I realize, but these are alarming numbers (from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, via Bill Bennett, Alex Dattig, and Seth Leibsohn):

In 2009, nearly 22 million Americans were regularly abusing illicit drugs: a rise of 1.5 million abusers of marijuana from 2008 and a rise of 2.3 million users from 2007, a rise of 205,000 abusers of Ecstasy from 2008, a rise of 188,000 abusers of methamphetamine from 2008 and a rise of 800,000 abusers of prescription drugs from 2008.

Then there’s the death toll. Nearly 40,000 Americans are killed each year by drug overdoses — not drug-related car accidents, not drug-related gang violence or homicide; those are an entirely different and eye-popping set of numbers. By overdose alone, we lose the equivalent of more than one 9/11 a month and almost eight times as many Americans as have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 (deaths the national media reports on weekly, if not daily).

There are more people dying from drug overdose in America than people dying from gun violence. In several states, drug overdose deaths outnumber deaths caused by car crashes. But these drug-death statistics receive almost no media attention.

Andrew Stuttaford:

I had a look at the report cited by Mr. Bennett and, having done so, I can only congratulate him on the deft way he has borrowed the classic liberal technique of persuasion by crisis. I guess big government types are pretty much the same on either side of the aisle.

The alarm being sounded is that drug use was “on the rise” in 2009. Looking at the same statistics (which are taken from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health) as Mr. Bennett, that certainly seems to be true, but what does that rise really mean? If we look more closely at the data (and, more specifically, at the percentage of the population over the age of 12 using a particular drug), we see that cocaine use is flat (and down from the levels of a couple of years ago), hallucinogen consumption is up, but the overall level remains relatively low as a percentage of the population (and is the same as where it stood in 2002), the illicit use of psychotherapeutics (“prescription drugs”) is up, but to 2007 levels, and is still below the total estimated for 2006. The largest increase has been in marijuana use. 6.6 percent of the population were estimated to tried pot “in the last month” up from the roughly 6 percent that has been the norm since 2002, a jump certainly, but given the inevitable uncertainties that surround this data, and given that marijuana is a relatively benign drug, hardly cause for an Al Gore-style shriek.

Relatively benign? Well, let’s look at the total of nearly 40,000 fatal drug overdoses (from all drugs) used by Mr. Bennett as the centerpiece of his piece. That’s not a number I can find in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (perhaps the fault is mine), but if we turn to a recent piece of commentary on a CDC injury center blog, a total of 28,000 deaths from accidental drug overdose is given by the CDC for 2006, with the increase being primarily attributable to prescription drugs. No reference is made to marijuana.

Could it be because killing yourself with a marijuana overdose would require rather more energy than most stoners can manage? On some estimates, the user would have to consume (in one session) an amount roughly equivalent to some five thousand times the dose needed to get high. I’m reluctant to say that it could never have happened, but the record appears to show that there have been no deaths directly and/or solely attributable to marijuana overdose in the United States.

Kevin D. Williamson:

I second Mr. Stuttaford. The great Robert Higgs had it right: Whatever policy it is you prefer, a crisis can be found to argue for enacting it.

I do not propose to test the hypothesis that it would take 5,000 times the recreational dosage to overdose on marijuana, but I would like to know how much bazooka one has to smoke before deciding to appoint a UN representative to alien civilizations. Is there data on that? The wigs are getting pretty tight in Turtle Bay.

Mike Meno:

With only about five weeks left until Election Day, a new Field Poll of likely voters shows California’s Proposition 19 leading 49 to 42 percent, fueled by large majorities of voters younger than 40 and those who live in the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles metropolitan areas.

Prop 19:

It legalizes various marijuana-related activities, allows local governments to regulate these activities, permits local governments to impose and collect marijuana-related fees and taxes, and authorizes various criminal and civil penalties.

Pot is much less dangerous than booze. It has its own set of problems but none as lethal as the liver and violent behavior associated with alcohol.

Daily duh! armed citizens reduce crime

John R. Lott Jr.:

President Obama undoubtedly didn’t intend it, but he deserves some credit for the recent report that all violent crime rates dropped in 2009, murder rates by 7.4 percent, robbery rates by 9 percent: His election caused gun sales to skyrocket, and crime rates to plummet.

Gun sales started notably rising in October 2008, and sale really took off immediately after Obama won the presidential race: 450,000 more people bought guns in November 2008 than bought them in November 2007. That’s over a 40 percent increase in sales. By comparison, the change from November 2006 to November 2007 was only about 35,000. Over the last decade, the average year-to-year increase in monthly sales was only 21,000.

The higher sales continued well beyond November 2008: about 3.15 million more people bought guns in the 14 months after the election than in the preceding 14 months. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, doesn’t tell us how many guns each person bought, just the number of people who bought them. Most likely, though, gun sales rose by more than the number of people who purchased them.

At the same time gun sales were soaring, there was an unusually large drop in murder rates. The 7.4 percent drop in the murder rate was the largest drop in murder rates since the 1999. For those who don’t remember, 1999 — when Bill Clinton was president and Columbine occurred — was another time when gun sales soared. With Clinton domestic-policy advisers such as Elena Kagan pushing hard for more gun control, Americans were worried that more gun bans were coming; in response, gun sales soared.
...
Americans living in the District of Columbia and Chicago have seen this phenomenon firsthand. After bans went into effect in both cities, murder rates rose dramatically. The District’s murder rates then plunged by 23 percent in 2009 after the Supreme Court threw out D.C.’s gunlock laws and handgun ban. After that 2008 decision, 70,000 D.C. residents were able to use their long guns for self-defense. As my research in the just-released third edition of More Guns, Less Crime shows, murder rates don’t fall and tend to climb when guns are banned.

In praise of dead white men

Lindsay Johns:

Efforts to make education more "relevant" to black people can be both patronising and harmful. The western literary canon should be taught to everyone.

Sadly, the canon has a serious image problem amongst black people, too. Many see it as the preserve of white public schoolboys, taught in fusty classrooms by doddery Oxbridge tutors. We have been led to see it as whitey’s birthright, not ours. Meanwhile anti-racist educationalists and black community leaders rail against a racist curriculum which does not meet the cultural needs of their students, with some calling for “black schools” in which black culture—rather than an elite white culture—can be taught.

But the literary canon should not be the preserve of any one race. As both a writer of colour and an ardent (but not uncritical) devotee of the canon, I have little time for people who say that black people cannot relate to books written 2,000 years ago by a bunch of dead white guys, or that Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare. This denies us our shared humanity across racial divides.

Dead white men, the pillars of the western canon, remain supremely relevant to black people in the 21st century, because their concerns are universal. At its best, the canon elucidates the eternal truths at the heart of the human condition. It addresses our common humanity, irrespective of our melanin quotient. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens—all male, all very white and all undeniably very dead. But would anyone be so foolish as to deny their enduring importance? Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Boccacio’s Decameron or Pico’s Oration On The Dignity of Man are as germane to black people as they are to white. There is no apartheid in the philosophical musings of Cicero, no racial segregation in the cosmic grandeur of Dante and no ethnic oppression in the amorous sonnets of Shakespeare. These works can, if given the chance, speak as much to Leroy in Peckham or Shaniqua in the South Bronx as they can to Quentin in the home counties.
...
Parts of the black community, however, continue to rail against the whiteness of the canon and try to promote second or third tier black writers such as novelist
E Lynn Harris or poet James Weldon Johnson. They are abetted by trendy educationalists in the establishment who feel acute post-colonial guilt and wish to show their anti-racist credentials by stressing the “diversity” of works taught in schools.

As black people, we cannot change history, and should not try to reject knowledge because of its provenance. It would be far better to focus our attention on understanding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of the canon, or why the humanities have, on the evidence of history, so comprehensively failed to humanise.

We should accept the truth of history, which is that white men have dominated intellectual life in the west. Let’s not resist this; let’s run with it. It is western history that has indelibly shaped our consciousness. We live in Britain, not Timbuktu. We might hail from Africa or the Caribbean, but our lives, for better or for worse, are lived in the modern western world, and shaped by the traditions that have moulded it. If we acquaint ourselves with the grammars of the west, it will indubitably help us to understand it and then duly succeed here.
...
Of course, there are many black luminaries—James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Alex La Guma, Frantz Fanon, Langston Hughes, Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley, to name a few—who deserve a place in the canon. What they possess in particular is what WEB Du Bois famously called “double consciousness”: the experience of both worlds, which white authors invariably lack. As a result, such authors excel in exploring questions of the “other” and its relationship to dominant constructions of race.

But here’s the rub—and the main reason why I come to praise dead white men, not to bury them: the overwhelming majority of black thought and literature of the last 400 years, by simple dint of the painful exigencies of human history, is devoted to chronicling man’s inhumanity to man. Naturally, if someone has me in shackles, is holding a gun to my head and denying me my basic human rights because of the colour of my skin, I would choose to firstly devote my intellectual energies to addressing that injustice. But it is undeniable that man’s inhumanity to man is only one part of the human condition.

PS The Brits call posh private schools "public schools."

An example of the type of stuff I will be posting on my new blog

I've posted stuff like this here before but this topic is of little interest to my regular readers. Hopefully it will be of interest to the young homos I will be trying to reach and help them to articulate their budding conservatism, patriotism and dislike of the so-called "gay agenda."

From Politico - They're gay, conservative and proud:

NEW YORK — Even among the gays, the right is on the rise.

The broad surge in the conservative grassroots made it as far as PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s grand apartment overlooking New York’s Union Square Tuesday night, where about 150 backers of the conservative gay group GOProud gathered to laugh at Ann Coulter’s red meat riffs on Democrats, blacks, and the Obamas at a fundraiser organizers touted as “Homocon.”

GOProud is the tea party of the gay rights movement, with well-tailored dark suits in place of revolutionary war garb.
...
GOProud is an explicitly gay group that isn’t particularly focused on gay rights, and Coulter’s speech – full of conservative red meat, and only the occasional Judy Garland joke – reflected its focus.

The gay right is thriving at a moment that the mainstream gay rights movement faces a profound crisis.

The set of Washington-based establishment groups led by the Human Rights Campaign have close ties to the White House and have turned gay righs into a plan of the Democratic Party platform.
...
The realization that their alliance with the Democratic Party has – for the moment – failed to produce key policy shifts is producing a round of finger-pointing and bloodletting inside the traditional gay rights movement, with calls for resignations and turns toward the courts and toward civil disobedience.

The gay right, meanwhile, has taken its place at the vanguard.
...
“We’re Joe Miller; Log Cabin is Lisa Murkowski,” said GOProud founder Chris Barron, dismissively. “We’re not interested in having a seat at the table as part of the establishment.”

Attendees at “Homocon” universally attributed the rise of the gay right to the rising conservative tide generally.

“It really was the economy stupid. There’s a move to the right in general,” said Thiel, who was also an early investor in Facebook and is a prominent supporter of libertarian causes. "An awful lot of Republicans want to get out of the gay issue in general.”
...
Coulter’s presence at the event was controversial, as other gay activists pointed out that she’d made a series of anti-gay remark — she called former presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" — which she explained away at the top of her speech as humor.

“The people who get gay jokes are gays,” she said, adding that when she talks to Christian audience, “Out of sweetness they don’t laugh at the gay jokes.”

Coulter’s jokes Tuesday riffed on the theme that GOProud doesn’t make same-sex marriage central to its appeal; it considers, Barron says, national security and the economy more important.

Marriage “is not a civil right – you’re not black,” Coulter said to nervous laughter. She went on to note that gays are among the wealthiest demographic groups in the country.

“Blacks must be looking at the gays saying, ‘Why can’t we be oppressed like that?’”
...
One, radio host Tammy Bruce, who is on GOProud’s board, said the moment has the “same energy” as the radical ACT-UP protests in the 1980s, which drew attention to the AIDS crisis.
...
As for Coulter, she told POLITICO the embrace of gays on the right could only be reciprocated.

“Right wingers have always liked gays. Look at all of Ronald Reagan’s gay friends,” she said, proceeding to cite an unverified rumor dating back half a century: “Look at my personal hero Joe McCarthy and his” – airquotes – “special assistant.”

It looks like Tammy Bruce has finally switched from being Democrat to Republican.

Joe McCarthy's “special assistant” was Roy Cohn whose lover, G. David Schine, also worked for McCarthy. I wrote about this 3 years ago.

From L to R - Schine, Cohn and McCarthy:

Why I'm still posting after saying I would stop

When I first started Born Again Redneck, conservative Christians (mistakenly) flocked to me. Some of their kids read BAR too and, when I started doing posts like "Queer Cowboys and Rednecks" and "Why I don't believe in gay rights" etc, I got (and still get) emails from some of their kids who are queer and conflicted about their sexuality and religion.

Search engines pick up my posts about homosexuality and I also get emails from young fags who are torn between their left-wing brainwashing and my libertarian individual rights take. (Obviously I also get hate-mail from commie queers telling me I'm like the self-loathing Jews who collaborated with Hitler.)

So I have started a blog aimed at young poofters which I can disseminate in the homo cyber-world. Right now I'm working on an essay, "There's no such thing as safe sex" which basically says you can protect yourself from diseases of the body with condoms but there's no prophylactic for the mental and spiritual diseases that are the consequences of thoughtless irresponsible promiscuity.

Right now my new blog is private and only accessible to Chas and Andy but, once I've posted more material there, I'll open it up to the public but I will not link to it from here as I doubt if it will be of much interest to anyone but fags.

I will still post the straightforward political stuff to BAR mostly because it gets so many search-engine hits.

I am also considering dumping Echo. I hate it. I've tried changing the name with which I comment from Barry to Joubert three times and each time the change lasts for one comment and then reverts. It's annoying and time wasting and, while comments are nice, I don't expect them.

9 Classic Myths and Whoppers about Firearms

For instance:

Myth #1 – Caliber Matters

First off let’s talk caliber. Let me say that this is one of the hottest topics out there and is bandied about with much fanfare and supposition on all sides by experts and non-experts. Here are some facts and figures that actually do matter.

1. A .22 has killed plenty of people. So have a .32, a .380, 9-milly, a .357, a .357 Sig, .40 and a .45 caliber. Bullet type (ball vs. hollow point) has more to do with effectiveness that the caliber.
2. The common term “Stopping power,” is more a measurement of energy and has nothing to do with a dynamic target such as the human body.
3. Shot placement is key.
4. The cavity a bullet can make in a block of gelatin, wet phone books, or a water jug, has very little to do with what it can do in a diversely dense target such as the human body. The human body has differential densities i.e. muscle, tendon, bone and voids (lungs and intestines). All of these affect how the bullet performs.

What does all this mean? Well, if you plan on using your firearm in a deadly force engagement then you better know how to use it and where you need to hit them. Do I carry a .22 to serve a warrant? No, but I don’t walk around loaded for warrant service when I go to the store for a gallon of milk either.

Pick the right tool for the job, I wouldn’t want to use the 16 pound sledge to drive out the pins from a pistol on my gun bench and I wouldn’t want to drive tent stakes into hard earth with the brass hammer either. If you need to and can comfortably conceal & carry a .45, good on you if you are willing to do it every day.

Why I can't stand Mark Levin

Mark Levin: I’m not so sure about Chris Christie.

All Levin does is kvetch. The GOP does not need whiners right now.

Daily duh!

The 2013 IPCC report will now include solar effects in their "models":

Over the famous 11-year solar cycle, the sun's brightness varies by just 0.1 per cent. This was seen as too small a change to impinge on the global climate system, so solar effects have generally been left out of climate models. However, the latest research has changed this view, and the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due in 2013, will include solar effects in its models.

Bishop Eddie Bling Long: "I'm not long but I am thick"

Bishop's empire hangs in the balance amid allegations he had sex with 3 young men:

ATLANTA — Bishop Eddie Long built his congregation into a megachurch empire, telling his followers God wanted them to be wealthy and delivering fiery sermons with a secular swagger. But that empire hangs in the balance amid accusations he had sexual relationships with three young men.

On Sunday mornings, Long is usually draped in regal robes and dripping with diamonds and platinum — the kind of material rewards he often says are in God's plan for those listening. He hangs with celebrities like rapper T.I. and donates money to charities and candidates. Even the county sheriff is among his followers.

Long spent more than 20 years building all that up. And his 25,000 followers aren't about to let it all come tumbling down after the three men filed lawsuits claiming the bishop abused his spiritual authority.
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He's preached against gay marriage, and his church has counseled gay members to become straight — even though the men claim in their lawsuits that Long used money, cars, international trips, jewelry and other objects to lure them into sexual relationships when they were 17 or 18 years old.
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Today, New Birth operates more than 40 ministries. The centerpiece of its campus is the $50-million New Birth Cathedral, which opened in 2001 and seats 10,000.

Meanwhile Ted Haggard opines:

The Rev. Ted Haggard, who resigned in 2006 from the Colorado Springs, Colo., megachurch he founded after a Denver man accused him of paying for sex, said it's better in the long run for Long and his church that the three accusers have filed lawsuits.

Haggard said courts are better than internal church bodies at establishing whether such accusations are truthful.

"At least there will be an orderly process and due process, which is a gift," said Haggard, who has recently started a new church.

Ted Haggard and Eddie Long:

Ted Haggard is a strong Republican. Eddie Long is a staunch Democrat and was quoted as saying after Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election, "This is a century of prayers answered."
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So now, we have two "Men of God" who have sent a message. (By the way, these men aren't Catholic in case you're one of those who thinks the Catholic faith are the only ones in the wrong these days). That message has made them millions of dollars (By the way, Long was accused of stealing over $3 million from his charities three years ago) is that homosexuality is wrong. They have ranted and raved from pulpits across the country how two men or two women loving each other in a sexual fashion is against God's will and people have signed over their checking accounts to these individuals. And now, amidst this evil rhetoric that so many have followed, the one man, the white man, the Republican, was actually gay. The other man, the black man, the Democrat, may have been coercing sex with teenage boys in his congregation and may be gay himself.

Talk about going on the down-low! (Down-low is an African-American slang term which refers to a subculture of men who usually identify as heterosexual, but who have sex with men.)

PS This is probably all about deep pockets - as were many of the Catholic priest scandals. The bishop's young men were all of the age of consent and the bishop gave them sports-cars, Caribbean vacations and lots of bling and ka-ching.

"I promise you it won't hurt. It's not that long but it is thick. About this fat round..."

GOP Pledge To America

Dan Riehl's precis.

Roll Call says it's heavy on spending cuts and light on social issues.

Make your own moonshine

A moonshine maker describes his setup - a Boing Boing exclusive.

"I wish that I had let myself be happier"

REGRETS OF THE DYING:

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
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When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

Men's hats making a come-back

Put a Lid on It:

Back in the day -- "the day" being decades ago -- hats were a given of any man's wardrobe, an apparel item that combined form and function at an affordable price. It's a fact reflected in photographs of breadlines during the Great Depression: One thing that millions of unemployed American men had in common -- besides being jobless -- were the hats on their heads.

Headwear began to fall from favor with men in the early '60s, as longer hair styles and more casual fashions came to the fore.

Recently, though, hats have made an impressive comeback, becoming for many an indispensable adjunct to the everyday wardrobe, while easily adding a dash of dignity and polish. For hat devotees, the aggressively casual baseball cap just won't do any more.
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Stetsons, Borsalinos and Kangols are among practically any hat you might fancy in a range of styles and colors, from Irish newsboy caps to bowlers, from top hats (a fixture of steampunk subculture) to porkpies, to the fedoras still favored by the store's older clientele. "The biggest client for sales right now is the 20-to-30-somethings."
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Irish wool caps at prices between $65 and $75; sturdier Irish newsboys go for $100. Rakish Borsalinos cost between $150 and $450, while classic summer-weight flat Kangol caps are priced from about $30. And if you're in a mood to indulge your inner Sam Spade, the legendary fedoras sell for about $50 (wool felt), up to $150 (fur-felt), to just over $500 for supple beaver.

Well, for some of us balding old farts, hats never went out of fashion.

World's oldest man: "With all the hatred in this world, in this good world, let us be kind to one another"

World's oldest man marks 114th birthday in Montana:

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — A Montana resident believed to be the world's oldest man celebrated his 114th birthday Tuesday at a retirement home in Great Falls.

Walter Breuning was born on Sept. 21, 1896, in Melrose, Minn., and moved to Montana in 1918, where he worked as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway for 50 years.

His wife, Agnes, a railroad telegraph operator from Butte, died in 1957. The couple had no children.

Breuning inherited the distinction of being the world's oldest man in July 2009 when Briton Henry Allingham died at age 113. Allingham had joked that the secret to long life was "Cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women — and a good sense of humor," according to Guinness World Records.
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He said men and women are able to enjoy life, but they can't be content without a belief or faith. His parting message to the crowd was one of tolerance.

"With all the hatred in this world, in this good world, let us be kind to one another," Breuning said.

Breuning has celebrity status at the retirement home, with visitors waiting in line to see him, Ray Milversted, 92, told The Great Falls Tribune.

Tina Bundtrock, executive director of the Rainbow, said the home has adopted a policy of scheduling visits with Breuning by appointment, so he's not taxed by people dropping in to see him.

Gavin Seeberger recalled how his father, former Great Falls banker John Seeberger, tried to persuade Breuning in the mid-1990s to purchase a two-year certificate of deposit instead of a five-year CD. Breuning had come into the bank to take advantage of a special rate on five-year CDs, and he insisted that he would be there to collect it in person at age 105 when it matured.

And he did, Gavin Seeberger told the Great Falls newspaper.

"That is being sure of one's self," he said.

Mike Pence

In a straw poll at the Values Voter Summit, the Republican receives 24% of the vote. Mike Huckabee came in second with 22%:

Indiana Rep. Mike Pence was the top choice for a 2012 presidential candidate among conservative activists who attended this weekend's Values Voter Summit in Washington.

From Mike Pence's Hillsdale College Speech on the Presidency:

[It is] a high honor for me to stand before you in this place so closely associated with the founding of the Republican Party in opposition to the unforgivable sin of slavery; this place where statesmanship is taught as an art, and where right conduct is seen as its own reward. I thank you, and may God bless you for your bravery and courage.

I rise to pay a debt of honor and a debt to history. My subject today is the presidency, and my hope is that you see that institution in a new light and never despair of the republic.
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The president is not our teacher, our tutor, our guide or ruler. He does not command us, we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision. It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others. It is neither his job nor his prerogative to shift the power of decision away from them, and to him and the acolytes of his choosing.
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Listen to the exact words of the leader of President Obama's transition team and perhaps his next chief-of-staff: "It's important that President-Elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one."
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No finer, more moving, or profound an understanding of the nature of the presidency and the command of humility placed upon it has ever been expressed than by President Coolidge. He, like Lincoln, lost a child while he was president, a son of sixteen. "The day I became president," Coolidge wrote, "he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, 'If my father was president I would not work in a tobacco field,' Calvin replied, 'If my father were your father you would.' "

While in the White House, President Coolidge's son contracted blood poisoning from an incident on the South Lawn. Coolidge wrote, "What might have happened to him under other circumstances we do not know, but if I had not been president.…" And then he continues, "In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not.

"When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him."

A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic but life itself.

Read the whole thing. It's excellent.

The best South African movies I've seen this year

I was born and raised in South Africa and still occasionally get home-sick. But it's 12,000 miles away so, when I feel a pang of nostalgia, I rent a South African movie.

Eventhough District 9 was produced by Peter Jackson (who made the Lord of the Rings film trilogy) and was nominated for four Academy Awards in 2010, it was disappointing. I enjoyed the South African in-jokes but it was clumsily made and was probably only nominated out of political correctness.

However these four movies were most satisfying.

Disgrace 2008:

After an imprudent affair with a student, Cape Town professor David Lurie (John Malkovich) flees to his daughter's remote farm to escape the scandal, only to find tragedy when a trio of black youths brutally assaults them. But Lurie is forced to face apartheid's lasting repercussions when he discovers that one of the attackers is related to a trusted employee (Eriq Ebouaney) in this pensive drama based on J.M. Coetzee's novel.

Malunde 2001:

Post-apartheid South Africa is the setting for this drama about a mismatched twosome who end up together on a life-altering journey to Cape Town. Polar opposites Kobus (Ian Roberts), a white ex-soldier who struggles with demons from his past, and Wonderboy (Kagiso Mtetwa), a young black street kid who clings to memories of his family, come together to take on the society that has cast them aside and eventually build a friendship for the ages.

Boy Called Twist 2004:

This contemporary spin on the immortal novel Oliver Twist follows an orphan named Twist (Jarrid Geduld) who survives on the streets of Cape Town, South Africa, by taking up with a band of young thieves. But Twist is soon caught picking the pocket of affluent Ebrahim Bassedien (Bill Curry), who -- instead of filing charges -- finds kinship with the boy and takes him in. Meanwhile, his criminal cohorts conspire to bring him back into the fold.

Beat the Drum 2003:

When a mysterious illness wipes out his entire village, claiming the lives of both his parents, 9-year-old Musa (Junior Singo) is forced to set off on his own, eventually joining the ranks of the scores of orphans who live on the streets of Johannesburg. Directed by David Hickson, this poignant award-winning film examines the heartbreaking effect that AIDS has had on the poor and underprivileged children of Africa.

Why there is no British Tea Party

Alex Massie:

More on Christine O'Donnell's stunning victory in the Delaware GOP Senate primary in due course but it's worth pointing out that such a triumph almost certainly could not happen in Britain. Not even in our new primary-friendly Tory party.

Because most of the contests called primaries in Britain are really forms of caucus, not proper primaries and even the so-called "open primaries" that have been held by postal ballot are actually only semi-open. In each case voters are offered a choice of candidates who have been approved by Tory HQ. It is not, in other words a truly open process and consequently it's exceedingly difficult for a grass-roots rebellion to take place.

This is one reason why there is no British Tea Party. The establishment party controls who is put on the ballot even in the so-called open primaries and, generally speaking, the party isn't going to risk putting forward for selection the British equivalents of O'Donnell or Rand Paul. Genuinely open primaries could change that and that's why no party, I think, has any desire to emulate the openess of the American system. Sometimes, you see, the "wrong" people win.

For all David Cameron's talk of a new, more open kind of party politics the truth is, that for understandable reasons (from the leadership's perspective that is), it's only a degree more open than previous methods of selecting candidates.

Exactly. Britain has never been truly democratic. Aristocrats may no longer be the only ruling class but they have simply been augmented by elitist bureaucrats who pull all the strings.

Christine O'Donnell's lesbian sister

From A tale of two sisters:

Tea party/Christian right Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell has long decried homosexuality; her sister Jennie supports gay rights and says she lives with a girlfriend.
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[O'Donnell] has a sister named Jennie who lives in Los Angeles. And Jennie's Facebook and LinkedIn pages depict a person who appears to be quite different than Christine—in essence, the polar opposite. Yet the two have recently appeared on the campaign trail together, with Jennie obviously supporting her sister's Senate bid.

On her Facebook page, Jennie notes that she "live [sic] in west hollywood ca with my girlfriend and my dogs. just try to keep it simple and live!" She notes she is self-employed as a "spiritual psychologist, actor, meditation teacher." She describes her political stance as "conservative liberal." As for religious views, she says she is "into spirituality, not one religion, study all religions, take what i like, leave the rest."
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On LinkedIn, Jennie O'Donnell notes:

I have studied and practiced many therapeutic methods, as well as many different spiritual practices, such as; The Eastern Philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Sidha yoga with Brahma khumaris and other yoga practices for self realization. Western philosophies of Christianity, Science of mind, Course in miracles, Catholicism, Native American Spiritualities, Judaism, Muslim, Sufi, Ancient Alchemy of the Emerald Tablet, Metaphysics, Wicca, Pagan and many other world spiritualities.

On Wednesday, Jennie posted this message on Facebook:

to all my friends and family..thank you for your great wishes.. for the wisdom to see through the insane lies that were being tossed around, and still will be, i supose. i'm sure they will make up new ones; but thank you for your love, support prayers, good humor... and support of my sister,no matter what lies were made up about her...oh.. p.s. haave you heard the latest? she's homophobic... gotta laugh

Interesting. Of course Jennie lives in West Hollywood but she doesn't sound any more woo-woo than her neighbors.

Why I don't do Facebook

From BoingBoing:

A series of "embarrassing and damaging" IMs from Mark Zuckerberg have been confirmed as real by The New Yorker, and by the Facebook founder himself. At issue is an exchange leaked to Silicon Alley Insider and published this past March, in which Zuckerberg explains to a friend that his control of Facebook affords him access to any personal information he might care to access on any Harvard student:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don't know why
ZUCK: they "trust me"
ZUCK: dumb fucks

I saw an interview with Zuckerberg on Fox News a while back (maybe on Cavuto?) and took an instant dislike to him. What a sleaze.

The Top 5 Conservative (Recent) Movies

According to John Nolte at Big Hollywood they are:

1. The Road
2. From Paris With Love
3. Dear John
4. Book of Eli
5. Brooklyn's Finest

I've just added them to my Netflix queue.

Androphilia

This blog has been dying and on life-support for a while mostly because it's tedious talking about how Obama and the Democratic Party have destroyed our economy. Lately I've been indulging myself in the sort of posts that I enjoy and which I use as references for further reading. Years ago I joked that I should really call this blog BARF - Born Again Redneck Fag. I think I may stop joking and do so.

Recently we saw a documentary about masculine homosexuals - mostly about famous football players and other athletes. But the author Jack Malebranche was also interviewed. His real name is Jack Donovan but he writes under the name Jack Malebranche. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his long-time male partner.

From the Free Library:

Androphilia by Jack Malebranche Scapegoat Publishing 15608 S. New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248 9780976403586, $12.95 www.SCBDistributors.com

Jack Malebranche, the author of Androphilia: A Manifesto Rejecting the Gay Identity Reclaiming Masculinity, is a bisexual man who prefers the company of and sexual relations sexual relations with men--to the extent that he shares a long-term sexual and personal bond with another man. Yet he emphatically rejects the label "gay" because in today's culture the concept of "gay" has become intermingled with the concepts of feminization, abandoning masculinity, underachievement, and irresponsibility to the lengths of false victimhood.

Androphilia: A Manifesto rejects the baggage-laden gay identity, and calls for humankind to recognize homosexual desire as apolitical.

[He writes:]

The Gay Party tells us that we homosexuals must band together to fight against high-school bullies, and to encourage kids to 'come out' and ghettoize themselves into little gay support groups where they can become conversant in Party dogma and avoid ever having to learn to deal effectively with their straight peers.
...
The Gay Party insists we learn that we are victims of heterosexual oppression, and imagine that everyone is out to get us.

Malebranche prefers to substitute the word "androphile" for "gay" to describe himself, as he is an unrepentant advocate of the positive aspects of masculinity and male culture. Androphilia: A Manifesto does not attack or criticize those men (homosexual or heterosexual) who want to emulate effeminate qualities.

The crux of matter is not that men should be forced to be manly, but rather that the majority of them simply are manly, and should not be pressured by the gay culture to despise or reject their masculinity. Nor should a man's sexuality automatically define his hobbies, his politics, his interests, or who can or cannot be his friends. Though readers, regardless of gender or sexual orientation sexual orientation may not agree with all Androphilia has to say, Androphilia is invaluable for its core messages of being self-reliant and true to oneself, and for its frank discussion of whether "gay marriage" (as opposed to less radical measures like domestic partnerships, which are more likely to be successfully accepted nationwide) is needed at all to govern same-sex relationships incapable of producing children who are the biological offspring of both parents.

From Heathen Harvest:

Jack Malebranche was certainly not looking to make friends within the worldwide and ever expanding “Gay Community” when he set about writing Androphilia. Much like the massive upheaval of Lutheranism, Androphilia threatens to collapse the “Gay Identity” in upon itself revealing a new ideal by which to lead the homosexual community forward. Jack has come to liberate homosexual men from the trappings of sissydom by revealing the inherent but largely shunned masculinity in many homosexual males.

Written like a man impassioned to rescue his people who have been led astray to wander a barren and desolate domain divorced from their very nature Jack rains down blow after blow on “Gay Culture” breaking away the definitions and inhibitions of social and political agendas revealing the raw and undiscovered force of the true homosexual male identity. It comes as no surprise that such an ambitious declaration would find a home with Scapegoat Publishing whose motto reads “Blame Us.” No doubt with a title like roots. Androphilia – A Manifesto “Rejecting The Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity most of the magazines and publishers within the “Queer Press” would find Jack’s revolutionary ideas to be a threat to their investment in “Gay Culture.”

So what is Jack really attempting with Androphilia and is he successful? With so many books attempting to hand homosexual men theories on identity, community, sexuality, etc. is Androphilia a revealing or relevant voice in the din of self help books and feel good declarations of homosexual elitism? Testifying as a man loving homosexual I am compelled to declare this as one of the most relevant books on the subject of homosexuality that I have ever read.

Jack leads the reader on a journey buffered with historical and social references that trace the progression of attitudes and ideas about homosexuality and the men who participate in it from the glorified days of such masculine homosexual icons as Alexander the Great to the modern day gay ideal of female and feminine idealization. Through various approaches and angels Jack explores the historical / social progression of homosexuality becoming related to effeminate behavior and the eventual progression of homosexual males being defined as something “other” than their heterosexual male counterparts. This distinction has had devastating consequences leading homosexual males to become identified with anything but traditional masculinity in the rag tag rush to establish a new identity.

As naturally masculine homosexual male I found Jack’s book to be the missing link in my own life journey. Androphilia casts out a rescue rope to those of us floating in the ocean of “Gay Culture” adrift and alienated from the deification of femininity and the celebration of all things sissy and trivial. In order to break these stereotypes and liberate the queer community from these chains of self-imposed restriction Jack has had to deconstruct some of the highest held tenants of “Queer Culture” such as the myth that homosexuality is not a choice. Jack discusses how homosexual men in past centuries chose to marry women and have productive families whilst ignoring their homosexual impulses or else acting on them in secrecy. This proposition that homosexuals have choice as to whether they act upon such sexual impulses flies in the face of the “Queer” agenda yet no one can deny that having sex with anyone is indeed a choice driven by sexual impulse. The book is filled with many such taboo ideas that threaten to deconstruct the current Gay Rights political agenda. Though some may see this as threatening I found the idea empowering that I choose to share my flesh with men rather than being victim to some uncontrollable influence of nurture or nature that leaves one with a sense of victimization. Another revealing discussion is the idea that queer men lack respect in the eyes of their heterosexual male counterparts because they have largely abandoned the ideals and responsibilities of manhood and masculinity thus not making them men in the eyes of other men who shoulder the burden of masculinity. Ideas such as these reveal painful revelations which if addressed could heal the rift and alienation felt by homosexual from society and mainstream culture.

The core theory of the book is the proposition of a new identity titled “Androphile” which describes a male love of the masculine. This Androphile is in many ways the counter image of the modern “Fag”. The Androphile enjoys the company of his fellow man, enjoys traditionally male pursuits and forms of recreation and as an extension of this enjoyment of the masculine his sexuality is also indulged by enjoying the fraternal sexual company of his fellow man. This new “Androphile” identity is exactly what has been missing in the modern gay culture whose only emulation of the masculine is embodied in such staged like productions as the Village People who fall far from an authentic representation of masculinity. Jack is careful not to dismiss the effeminate queer man but rather offers those who fall outside this stereotype a shelter. Jack acknowledges that though some queer men are inherently feminine somehow we have all become defined as such leaving no place in queer or mainstream culture for the masculine identified homosexual male.

In addition to proposing some very compelling ideas and arguments Jack also offers suggestions for homosexual men looking to deprogram their queer / sissy identity and begin exploring their inherent masculine nature. The author discusses the roots of the “queer inferiority” complex and offers encouraging ideas on how to find your niche amongst other men regardless of their sexual orientation. By laying claim to traditional masculine roles, ideals, and responsibilities masculine inclined homosexual men might find that missing something that gay culture threw in the gutter as they stampeded into the mainstream spotlight.

I found Androphilia to be a gripping read. The book flows easily between chapters and the progression is nicely structured leading from one conclusion to another. Concise is another word which applies to the book. Wrapping up at a mere one hundred and forty- three pages Androphilia is anything but excessive. The author trims the fat and delivers his ideas without much waste of the readers time. Though the book is rather short the ideas inside may take the reader some time to digest. Some of the suggestions where so foreign to me I had to set the book aside for a week at a time in order to fully ponder the suggestions and allow my own thinking to readjust to the new ideas. At times I found myself rejecting some of the ideas the author suggesting only to later find myself agreeing after my initial defenses relaxed. And that is nothing to say about the discussions this books has spurred amidst me and my friends.

Lastly, this book is a worthwhile read not only for homosexual men but for any man. It is the first discussion about masculinity of its nature I have ever read and it left me wondering what we have yet to discover about ourselves as men in light of the feminist movement which has published countless books addressing the reality of womanhood.

I thank Jack for going out on such a tenuous limb to write and publish this much needed manifesto and I encourage all the men and women reading this to purchase a copy and allow your hard set ideas about masculinity and self under go the trial of Androphilia! For very dismissive or denouncing review this book might receive in the mainstream queer press it is sure to be held in high regard by the many refugees of “Queer Culture.”

Matt Moody in the Gay and Lesbian Times:

“I am not gay.” Jack Malebranche’s first four words hooked me from the start – an epiphany, a rallying call, a simple declarative statement that revoked the emasculating and encapsulating power of the word, “gay.”

As a manifesto, Malebranche’s Androphilia: A Manifesto Rejecting the Gay Identity Reclaiming Masculinity asserts a point of view I’ve long shared which is that despite my personal sexual preferences, I really have very little in common with so-called gay culture – a culture broadcasted, controlled, and encouraged by the Gay Party, a radically leftist group of past counter-cultural rebels who have now congregated into a truly corporate machine, rolling dollar after dollar into special interest legislation bent in one direction, not open to dissent or self-reflection. It’s a party so desperate for normalcy that it ignores the many problems plaguing its own members – a disparate hodgepodge of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, and myriad other confusing neo-liberal labels too complex and arbitrary to list, a party so hungry for acceptance and inclusion that it consistently seeks approval and acknowledgement from a society that would rather see it disappear.

Androphilia as a concept is a rebuttal of the word gay and everything it connotes and promotes. Per Malebranche, “the word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics … gays stand for the notion that sexuality engenders ethnicity and complete social identity.”

Androphilia, on the other hand, is at once a rejection of the gay identity and its clichéd effeminate stereotype, and reclamation of masculinity via the quest for an authentic masculine identity. Not the uber-queer choose-your-own-form-of-masculine definition, which is often just another way to say effeminate, and not the hyper-masculine invention by leather men and bears which is just another form of drag, but a qualified masculinity based on physical, essential, and cultural elements outlined in the text.

So the book addresses how reclaiming a masculine identity is necessary to counteract the negative and effeminizing forces of modern gay culture. It promotes a masculine ideal of self-reliance, independence, and personal responsibility through achievement, respect, and integrity. Best of all, the author suggests that men should build alliances with other men, including heterosexual men. Androphile men should develop strong relationships with heterosexual men, not just others with the same preference. Because the fact of the matter is, the forces emasculating gay men are doing the same to straight men. If you disagree, think about the political-correctness of metrosexuality and other gender blending in today’s popular culture. The author’s belief is that only through building an alliance with other masculine men will the tide turn in the favor of reclaiming and establishing a masculine identity again, for all men, yet especially for men who love or prefer men – androphiles.

In this age of squalid political correctness, to speak out as a homosexual or androphile against organizations such as the HRC or GLAAD could be equivocated by some as biting the hand that feeds you. However, the named powerful organizations do so little to counteract the negative characteristics and qualities of the loosely knit and contrived communities they represent.

GLAAD glorifies effeminate affectations and representations of gay men as positive developments in the mainstream media. They aren’t. Effeminate gay men on television are like blackface actors in southern theaters during segregation. They do nothing but promote an emasculating stereotype that continues to further weaken gay men in the eyes of heterosexual men. HRC gushes about its achievements in corporations and political campaigns. Each organization touts ephemeral qualities of inclusion, diversity, and the intoxicating idea of equality. Yet anyone who speaks out against either organization out of a sense of pragmatism is castigated, shunned, or patronized for their dissent.

Republican homosexuals are treated as villains. Libertarians are scoffed at. Constitutionalists are trivialized. Anyone who doesn’t agree with a feminist perspective is ridiculed. Masculine-identified men are labeled as internally homophobic. But it is worse than that. The current gay “culture” fosters young adults into a world of designer drugs, materialism, body dysmorphia – bigorexia and anorexia, classism and a plethora of other social maladies.

The community is, in actuality, a disaggregated and forced collection of people who frankly don’t really like each other that much. Nor should they. If you disagree, ask a lesbian how much she really likes going to a circuit party – and perhaps she could take the kids, too! Ask a military officer how comfortable he or she would feel on a Pride float. Proud of what? The GLBT alphabet soup with all of its anti-war Democrats? Or proud of their service to the country, which seems to matter to gays only if you reached veteran status and came out? Online profiles for horny gay men tout list after list of racial, HIV-status, age, money and political preferences. Gay bars are segregated along the same lines. Do we really have that much in common, or are we just pretending to?

The author studies and criticizes the rationale behind the research of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and his urning theory on homosexuality and argues instead that there should be a more libertarian approach to sexuality, the same approach that resulted in the decriminalization of sodomy laws in the Western world. Greek culture, Roman warriors, and other non-gay forms of male relationships are examined to contrast with the current anti-masculine gay sexuality.

Another critical point in the book is how men who disavow gay culture should also remove themselves from what he believes is a culture of victimization and being the underdog. He asserts that if someone defines themselves by their travails, they will never truly be free of them. Most GLBT people these days haven’t faced that much harassment, if any, so gay culture continues to promote a victim mentality even in those who have never been victims.

Personally, the vindication I feel in reading this book is that finally, finally, another gay man is advocating what I’ve believed for years: the belief that men who admire or love men should be more responsible, not give into the effeminate gay cultural fad, avoid the personal, career, and social pitfalls common to those who live in a completely emasculated world, and build stronger ties with heterosexual men who share common interests.

I agree. I am not gay, either. I’m an androphile.

From Jack's own website selling his book:

The word gay has never described mere homosexuality. Gay is a subculture, a slur, a set of gestures, a slang, a look, a posture, a parade, a rainbow flag, a film genre, a taste in music, a hairstyle, a marketing demographic, a bumper sticker, a political agenda and philosophical viewpoint. Gay is a pre-packaged, superficial persona—a lifestyle. It’s a sexual identity that has almost nothing to do with sexuality.

Androphilia is a rejection of the overloaded gay identity and a return to a discussion of homosexuality in terms of desire: a raw, apolitical sexual desire and the sexualized appreciation for masculinity as experienced by men. The gay sensibility is a near-oblivious embrace of a castrating slur, the nonstop celebration of an age-old, emasculating stigma applied to men who engaged in homosexual acts. Gays and radical queers imagine that they challenge the status quo, but in appropriating the stigma of effeminacy, they merely conform to and confirm long-established expectations. Men who love men have been paradoxically cast as the enemies of masculinity—slaves to the feminist pipe dream of a ‘gender-neutral’ (read: anti-male, pro-female) world.

Androphilia is a manifesto full of truly dangerous ideas: that men can have sex with men and retain their manhood, that homosexuality can be about championing a masculine ideal rather than attacking it, and that the wicked, oppressive ‘construct of masculinity’ despised by the gay community could actually enrich and improve the lives of homosexual and bisexual men. Androphilia is for those men who never really bought what the gay community was selling; it’s a challenge to leave the gay world completely behind and to rejoin the world of men, unapologetically, as androphliles, but more importantly, as men.

The book, Androphilia, also has a Facebook page.

There is also a blog called Androphilia.

PS Gay Patriot recently did a post on the increasing presence of conservative gays at Tea Parties.

Jack and his partner and some friends (Jack wrote in the comments to this post, "One quick correction - the guy with me in that first photo is not my partner. He's a good pal of mine named Trevor Blake, and while I'm certain he wouldn't be offended, his girlfriend would probably disapprove of the confusion."):

The earth doesn’t care about what is done to or for it.

George Will:

Laughlin acknowledges that “a lot of responsible people” are worried about atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. This has, he says, “the potential” to modify the weather by raising average temperatures several degrees centigrade and that governments have taken “significant, although ineffective,” steps to slow the warming. “On the scales of time relevant to itself, the earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation.”

Buy a hybrid, turn off your air conditioner, unplug your refrigerator, yank your phone charger from the wall socket—such actions will “leave the end result exactly the same.” Someday, all the fossil fuels that used to be in the ground will be burned. After that, in about a millennium, the earth will dissolve most of the resulting carbon dioxide into the oceans. (The oceans have dissolved in them “40 times more carbon than the atmosphere contains, a total of 30 trillion tons, or 30 times the world’s coal reserves.”) The dissolving will leave the concentration in the atmosphere only slightly higher than today’s. Then “over tens of millennia, or perhaps hundreds” the earth will transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, “eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene.” This will take an eternity as humans reckon, but a blink in geologic time.

Quote of the day

Rick Hertzberg connects two kinds of political burning:

[Y]ou can’t burn “the” flag, and you can’t burn “the” Koran, either. The flag is a Platonic ideal. As such, it is fireproof. Any particular flag is merely a copy, and you can’t destroy the flag by destroying a flag any more than you can destroy (or even harm) the Constitution by destroying a copy of it. Nor can you destroy the Koran by destroying a copy thereof, or any number of copies.

Maybe I should have titled this "Stating the obvious."

The Five Best Conservative Books

Jonathan Rauch has edited a symposium on the best conservative books. The consensus winners were:

1. The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek

2. Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

3. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville

4. The Federalist, by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay

5. Free to Choose, by Milton Friedman

BTW Jonah Goldberg at has an article in the Washington Post’s Political Bookworm. An excerpt:

There’s a powerful upside to the downside of higher education: conservative students tend to come out of universities sharper, more self-confident and more ready to rumble in ideological debates because as members of a disfavored minority, conservative students have their preconceived notions tested every day.

Obviously, there’s no shortage of sharp liberal students on college campuses, but even the sharpest ones get a lot more of their education passively, because they largely agree with what their professors and textbooks say. Their prejudices and convictions are more likely confirmed, not tested. They can go with the flow never questioning the received wisdom because the received wisdom is what they brought to the classroom in the first place.

Meanwhile, conservatives — and right-leaning libertarians — must swim upstream. Some can’t handle it. Others simply avoid courses where their philosophical views might create headaches. But the righties who stick it out, graduate with four years of Socratic learning under their belts.

A final naked redneck chick post

I just couldn't resist posting this snippet from an interview with Debo Mitford, the last surviving Mitford sister.

A bit of background context. There were six sisters: Pam, who was the least well-known sister, described by John Betjeman as 'the most rural Mitford’; Nancy, who wrote several historical biographies and eight novels; Diana who married the fascist leader Oswald Mosley and was imprisoned during WWll; Unity, who moved to Germany in 1934 at the age of 19 and became devoted to Hitler (whom she knew in person) and ended up brain-damaged after a failed attempt at suicide by shooting herself in the head at the outbreak of war; Jessica, who became a communist and ran away at the age of 19 with Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew, and then moved to America and wrote several books, including "The American Way of Death"; and Debo the youngest who is now 90 years old.

Debo may not be the most famous or eccentric Mitford sister but...

In June 2000 some American friends of hers came to stay, who visited every year. They included the art collector Jayne Wrightsman and the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife. Thinking they would be bored by a table centre of flowers, and because chickens are her passion, a Buff Cochin cock was washed and placed on some hay in a rectangular glass container. 'A couple of hens of uncertain ancestry occupied another glass container,’ she writes, 'and there had been a hatch of Welsummer and White Leghorn chicks that morning so I put them in little china baskets lined with hay to keep them warm… the chicks presumably thought it was all quite normal as they had only been alive for 12 hours.’

'It was fantastic,’ recalls a guest who was there. 'But it only just worked. It was almost too much for the Americans.’

The following year Debo topped it by putting half a dozen piglets, replete from their feed, in straw beds on the middle of the table. 'But after the first course, my husband said, “That’s enough, take them away,” which was rather sad really.’

Debo's husband Andrew’s older brother Billy was married to Kick Kennedy, JFK’s sister.

She also got to know JFK quite well, and says he was one of the funniest people she ever met. 'He was so quick, and he made such fun of other people, but in such a nice way that they didn’t mind.’ She met Kennedy at a ball in 1938, and later became close friends with him; he would often ring her at 3am to chat, and she and Andrew attended his presidential inauguration in 1961 and, in 1963, his funeral.
...
[Debo] The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire has her own exhibition at Chatsworth, in celebration of her 90 years. There is a display cabinet with her diary open at the page where she writes about having tea with Hitler in 1937.
...
There is her collection of insect and spider brooches, and also what can only be described as an Elvis shrine, including a piece of picket fence with a nail that may or may not have been knocked in by the man himself.

When the talk turns to Elvis, she brightens considerably. 'Oh, don’t speak about Elvis,’ she says looking delighted. 'Wasn’t he wonderful? I never became a fan until after he was dead, otherwise I would have been a stalker.’

She has been to Graceland three times.

Her husband, Andrew, used to wear a tee-shirt with the words: "Never marry a Mitford." I recommend reading the whole interview if you're an historian of the inbred English aristocracy, student of English literature or simply a lover of British fruitcakes like the crazy chicken-loving Dowager Duchess of Devonshire nee Debo Mitford.